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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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From operator to entrepreneur: David Garcia applies outage management lessons
David Garcia
If ComEd’s Zion plant in northern Illinois hadn’t closed in 1998, David Garcia might still be there, where he got his start in nuclear power as an operator at age 24.
But in his ninth year working there, Zion closed, and Garcia moved on to a series of new roles—including at Wisconsin’s Point Beach plant, the corporate offices of Minnesota’s Xcel Energy, and on the supplier side at PaR Nuclear—into an on-the-job education that he augmented with degrees in business and divinity that he sought later in life.
Garcia started his own company—Waymaker Resource Group—in 2014. Recently, Waymaker has been supporting Holtec’s restart project at the Palisades plant with staffing and analysis. Palisades sits almost exactly due east of the fully decommissioned Zion site on the other side of Lake Michigan and is poised to operate again after what amounts to an extended outage of more than three years. Holtec also plans to build more reactors at the same site.
For Garcia, the takeaway is clear: “This industry is not going away. Nuclear power and the adjacent industries that support nuclear power—and clean energy, period—are going to be needed for decades upon decades.”
In July, Garcia talked with Nuclear News staff writer Susan Gallier about his career and what he has learned about running successful outages and other projects.
Mianzhen Mo (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), Umang Agarwal (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), Zhijiang Chen (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), Mungo Frost (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), Edna R. Toro (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), Nicholas Hartley (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), Fuhao Ji (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), Benjamin Ofori-Okai (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), Silvia Pandolfi (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), Alexander Reid (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), Eric Sung (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), Peihao Sun (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), Xiaozhe Shen (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), Katie Wootten (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), Ling Wang (SLAC Nat'l Accelerator Lab), Siegfried Glenzer (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), Xijie Wang (University of Duisburg-Essen), Klaus Sokolowski-Tinten (University of Duisburg-Essen), Yongqiang Wang (LANL), Peter Hosemann (Univ. California, Berkeley), Weicheng Zhong (ORNL), Erki Metsanurk (Uppsala University), Artur Tamm (University of Tartu), Alfredo A. Correa (LLNL)
Transactions | Volume 132 | Number 1 | June 2025 | Pages 308-309
